march 20 2002
dear cait,
I’m not sure at all when you’ll be back from your latest adventure, so I will write this on the last official day of winter so you’ll at least have something from me when you return.
missed ya babe! mail call just isn’t the same. Old man Ray (deaf as a post) yelled up at me to be sure & let him know my outside addy in a month or so. He’s ‘short’, having about 50 days to serve out on his violation. I yelled back, ‘sure, sure!’ but it’s just the ritual. gotta keep in touch(yeah, right) and all that.
they say this prison is about to upgrade it’s already formidable security. digital video cameras soon to be looking down on us from everywhere, 20 hours of recording, deleted if no incidents occur. it’s the wave of the future & the future is nearly upon us in that regard.
we have a new cellie, swaney & he’s easy to get along with. big old country boy, electrician republican brighter than most around here which isn’t saying a whole lot.
ya gotta write & tell me what the lines at the airports are like. I doubt I’ll ever fly voluntarily again. read the other day about an 80 year old woman in a wheelchair they had to thoroughly check out. made her take off her shoes (just in case!) and all that. I trust you left your turban & personal Koran at home. hee hee just kidding!
loveisarose said she’d talked to you online at the new site. was glad to hear that. continuity and all that. she sent me a greek lexicon & n.t. which have been greatly appreciated.
phantomheart is not feeling well. she wrote a couple of weeks ago. pretty down. I tried to cheer her up a little. she sent me a novel called Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. I think it was. pretty good book considering a telepathic gorilla…
so, how was the buk get together? by now you must have met some of the remaining players in his life. I’d love to read a good bio of his life one a these years.
there are times when I struggle w/depression, but for the most part my mental attitude remains good. am hoping to get a tutor job when an opening comes available. it’s just a matter of time.
this morning I sat out in the 2nd tier walkway & looked down on a young man who came in here the same day as i. he’s 29 & pulling a 30. as things currently stand, he’ll have to do 25 minimum. just another p.o.w. of the drug war.
so there is always someone worse off. lots of them, in fact. it helps me keep my perspective.
my former cellie back in county wrote, a chatty letter filled w/ the minutiae of life in the world and the problems thereof. he’s one of the ex captions to the ritual in that he actually does write! LOL. tommy my other cellie was denied halfway house. so he’ll have to serve out every day of his 16 month violation. in September they’ll shove him out the gate w/ a prison suit, $50.00 & a bus ticket.$50 won’t go far out there. he’s been down since 1967 w/ about a year in the world in all that time. they denied him halfway house because 20+ years ago he tried to go over the fence or something. back when he was still a young man. he really does not have a realistic chance of making it out there & I think he knows it. sigh. they violated him because of one dirty VA.
the technology for detecting drug usage is so advanced now that it’s foolish (in my opinion) to try to beat it. aside from UAs, they also have the patch which detects a whole host of drugs. and because an ex-felon on supervised release has no rights against search & seizure, they can literally come in at any hour of the day or night, search your living quarters, read your mail, journals, etc. this is just the reality all ex-felons have to live with as long as they’re ‘on paper’. I’ll have 3 yrs on paper. tommy, under the old law, will have 10 years. gold bless him. ten years on the slippery tight rope w/ no real job skills & the social skills of a man who has been down since he was 12.
we need a modern upton Sinclair, a muckraker, to wrote about what it’s like out there.
somewhere out in the world during one of his brief flings at freedom, he turned to heroin to make the pain & anxiety go away. I think he first used drugs in prison. now that I think of it, back in the days before modern security procedures were instituted.
they have what’s called the ‘wait room.’ it’s a cell they put an inmate in if they suspect he’s swallowed something during a contact visit. he’s in there for several days while they wait for whatever to come through his system. they check his feces. but just the other day they installed a new $800,000 x-ray machine which makes the wait room obsolete. it can detect a condom in the stomach. they feds are very professional in what they do. far more so than the state prison.
an additional unit which was on the drawing board to alleviate the overcrowding has been scrapped due to funding problems. the 3-man cells begin to look more & more like a permanent solution.
this is simply how it is. most of the co’s are decent people, very professional. they have to work with what they’re given to work with. so…we’re all caught up in the budget crunch & no one much likes it. so long as this country believes that the drug war is a good thing more & more prisons will have to be built.
but here’s a little known fact: if all illegal drug use stopped tomorrow, there would be just a 1% reduction in drug-related deaths. 99% come from legal drugs such as alcohol, tobacco, & prescription drugs. it’s totally a political thing & vast amounts of $ for already swollen budgets means its unlikely anything sane will come out of the process.
the politicians & the bureaucrats are addicted to the $, the property seizures, etc. meanwhile 100’s of 1000’s of families are torn apart in this futile attempt to stop what cannot be stopped short of a totalitarian police state.
this is just the way it is. I’m not into drugs, personally, but I see it more in terms of individual freedom of choice. we already have adequate laws to deal 2/ drunks who hurt people. that (violence against others) is obviously unacceptable.
anywho. sorry for the sermon.
we’ve had a few good days of nice weather. but I doubt we’re finished yet w/ the cold. hey! thus far I’ve made it through in pretty good shape! those sweats & thermals you made possible surely made a difference!
I continue to read, read, read, so at least some good is coming out of all of this. they say a liberal is just a conservative who’s been to prison. LOL. sure does tend to change a man’s mind about things.
more & more of the inmates are going back to the yard. I’ve not been there in months --- too cold! but one of these days I’ll head over there & walk the track.
I’m starting to get used to the food. my stomach is as flat as it was in my 20’s. still look pretty good, all things considered.
I realize I am so fortunate to have you as a true friend. so many in here are totally abandoned. life has passed them by. your letters let me know that life continues ‘out there’ & that it can be lived full, w/ great joy & creativity. I’ve never met anyone remotely like you, cait, & I can’t tell ya how much I simply…dig…who you are.
keep dancing’, ole pal. drop me a line when you come up for air. be careful out there. .. but not too careful. heehee.
love dixxx